Introducing Waltly Titanium Technology from China

Jenny from Waltly Titanium got in touch with me the other day to introduce themselves – I guess I shouldn’t be surprised as there must be loads of these little companies around, but you do wonder where all their customers come from?

(OK, now I’m starting to answer my own questions, taking a closer look at some of the frames I spotted the logo of Hi Temp 42 from Germany whose designs include a very smart looking 29’er. Although not 2590Euro smart mind!).

Having had a quick look they seem very much on a par with XACD or Titan and could be a bit cheaper too so I decided to find out more…

Waltly are a relatively young company and normally produce frames in batches, although when I asked Jenny she said that they would be prepared to do ‘sample’ frames as one-offs.

To get an idea of price I had a look at the range of frames displayed on their Facebook page. The one that caught my eye was belt drive ready, it’s got sliding dropouts, a split seatstay, tapered headtube and a brushed finish (not actually the frame below, they updated their photo hosting and I lost the original picture but this is close). All things that would have a considerable up-charge from XACD.

Jenny quoted me 600USD for the frame plus 105USD postage and 27USD Paypal Fee – 732USD (around £466 at the current exchange rate), although the frame pictured above could be more than that. I could see XACD charging 1000USD + for something like this so the Waltly offering looks like a bit of a bargain.

The details look nice and neat, but in this view of the dropout (above) I’m not sure about the way some of the welds look like they’ve been polished down. There’s also not much surface area in the joint between the dropout plate and the bullet tip of the stays, although that could just be me as I’ve always preferred Breezer style dropouts as the cowls give lots of area to weld the stay on to.

I’m liking this shot (below) as it shows Waltly can offer some contemporary finishing options; brushed finish with masked off sandblasting (I think, perhaps they are decals!). Plus a neat CNC’d headtube badge too. This is the frame that shows they manufacture for the German brand Hi Temp 42.

There were some other interesting looking frames over on their Facebook page too, including a sandblasted finish road bike frame:

And other nice details like this neat looking dropouts with inboard disk brake post mount:

And finally you can drop Jenny a line and have a chat about what you’d like built: waltly_jenny@waltly1688.com.cn Much like Porter, English isn’t her first language but she is super polite and replies back within 24hrs.

Are you a Titanium Frame manufacturer happy to make one-off sample frames? Do get in touch and say ‘Hi’…